Graduate Fashion Week celebrates Windrush impact

WINDRUSH GENERATION descendant – Tihara Smith will be presenting her final collection this June at Graduate Fashion Week (GFW), at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane from June 3-6 - and she's using Windrush as a key inspiration.

The starting point for Smith’s collection is the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, which carried West Indian immigrants to the UK. This was the beginning of mass immigration from the Caribbean, the people who arrived came to be known as ‘The Windrush Generation’.

Listening to stories of her grandfather, who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean in the 1950s, and through the lens of photographers, who documented the black experience from 1948 onwards, the experience of this generation is explored, with a focus on their everyday, domestic lives. This includes looking into the British West Indian front room, the décor, ornaments and souvenirs that they bought from home.

With recent events in the news, the fashion designer's collection has become very fitting in showing the positive outcome of the Windrush generation, which SmiTH, almost 70 years later has captured the moment and will proudly be presenting this at Graduate Fashion Week and showing that the positives of the Windrush lives on in the work that she has created.

Her collection celebrates the colour and the beauty of the Windrush generation, but also with a serious message of the pride of the Windrush generation, who made England their home.

Read every story in our hardcopy newspaper for free by downloading the app.